February 2015

Record dominoes 10: IMS sea ice extent

That's it, all the daily sea ice records (area, extent and volume) that I know of have been broken (see the ASI Graphs webpage). The last one is of minor importance when it comes to monitoring sea ice, but is interesting nonetheless as it was used as a last-minute straw that fake skeptics grasped when one record after the other was being smashed.

I'm talking about the Interactive Multisensor Snow and
Ice Mapping System (IMS) from NOAA's National Ice Center:As the trend line on this graph was slow to go below the other trend lines, fake skeptic Anthony Watts all of a sudden decided that this was the best and most trustworthy graph out there, calling all other products that measure and calculate sea ice cover into question. Watts' posts on sea ice are usually very short and mostly consist of copypasted material from the NSIDC, with hardly any analysis or mention of what is actually going on the Arctic (like that big summer storm, that ought to have been interesting to a weather man). It has been thus since 2010, when his and Steven Goddard's boisterous and blusterous announcement of a recovery of sea ice at the end of the 2010 melting season didn't pan out.

But in this lengthy post, riddled with mistakes and implications of deliberate fraud, Watts goes out on a limb and soon finds himself on his ass on the slippery ice. Again.

Take for instance this:

Note that we don’t see media pronouncements from NOAA’s NATICE center like “death spiral” and “the Arctic is screaming” like we get from its activist director, Mark Serreze.
So I’d tend to take NSIDC’s number with a grain of salt, particularly
since they have not actively embraced the new IMS system when it comes
to reporting totals. Clearly NSDIC knows the value of the media
attention when they announce new lows, and director Serreze clearly
knows how to make hay from it.

But then, as usual, Dr. Walt Meier from the NSIDC shows up in the comment section and patiently explains it all:

I’ll make a few points for clarification on the post above. First,
MASIE and IMS are the same product. MASIE is simply a repackaging of the
IMS data in easier to use formats. IMS is produced by the National Ice
Center (NIC), using similar sources and methods as they use for their
daily interactive maps. So all three of the examples provided are
closely related and not independent measurements.

The passive microwave estimates all show a record low for the Arctic.
These aren’t completely independent either – they all measure microwave
emission, but there are difference sensors (SSMIS, WindSat, and for the
first time AMSR2: http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2012/tp120825.html,
which is pretty exciting), and there are different processing methods
as well. There can always be potential errors in data, especially in
near-real-time, so having multiple sensors showing consistency provides
confidence that one sensor doesn’t have an error, which has happened
from time to time. When it does, we go back and reprocess and correct
the errors.

I worked at the National Ice Center for a couple years and have
collaborated with them many times since, so I’m familiar with their
methods and their focus. Their mandate is to map as much as ice as
possible as accurately as possible each day and week in support of ships
(particularly DoD ships) operating in and near ice-covered waters. They
work hard on getting today’s data analyzed and then tomorrow they start
over. They are not concerned with the past. If they can detect more ice
today than yesterday, then they map it. If they lose a sensor, they do
the best they can with what they have left. If they make an error, they
don’t go back and correct it -it’s on to the next day. NIC doesn’t
discuss climate or climate change because that is not their purpose and
from my experience working there, they just don’t have the time –
they’re focused on the here and now.

The charts are produced manually, so there is subjectivity in the
analysis that we don’t have in our fully automated processing. This
means that there can even be inconsistencies in adjacent regions if they
were analyzed by different people.

They have created an archive of their weekly ice charts, which is archived at NSIDC: http://nsidc.org/data/g02172.html.
There was some attempt to homogenize the charts (at least remove
regional discrepancies) during the production, but they do not produce a
consistent timeseries. MASIE, though it only goes back to 2006, has
similar issues of consistency.

The folks at NIC do a great job at what they’re focused –
navigational support. MASIE is an excellent data set and we at NSIDC
find it very useful looking at specific details about the ice (e.g., is
the Northwest Passage open or not), but the NIC products are not
applicable to studying climate-scale changes.

As usual, no text amendments, further explanations or apologies from Anthony Watts. Instead, a week later, we get another short "sea ice update" that shows a couple of selected graphs showing the melting season is about to end. I guess some people want it to end very badly, because it is so destructive to their position and PR efforts. And of course, the IMS sea ice extent graph, that has also reached a record low (again, meaningless, as this product is for navigational purposes and ship safety, and not climate research), is nowhere to be seen. How very surprising.

My advice to Anthony Watts: either you stop denying the seriousness of the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, or you just shut up about it. Because if you keep digging a hole in ice, you'll get wet and cold. My respect for you would increase tenfold if you'd decide to do the right thing. From the position you're in, it would take a lot of guts to do so.

In the meantime we await the confirmation of the new record for September sea ice extent, which will be announced by the NSIDC in October. There will probably be some other minor records as well (CT SIA anomaly, Global SIA, PICT). And then it's onto winter and its weird weather, followed by melting season 2013, which I'm not particularly looking forward to.

Comments

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Hi Neven, welcome back. Hope you had a good break.

And of course, the IMS sea ice extent graph, that has also reached a record low (again, meaningless, as this product is for navigational purposes and ship safety, and not climate research).

I wouldn't go quite as far as meaningless. I know it's not as good a proxy for the heat content as, say, the area is; but only in the same way that area is not as good a proxy as volume. And it documents an important regional effect of the changing climate: the Arctic is more open to navigation than ever on record. The political, commercial, and resource-extraction implications are just beginning.

Nice to see you back Neven. Also nice to see you mention how Watts had his ass handed to him (politely of course) by Walt Meier. When it comes to sea ice and the Arctic in general I call Watts, Goddard, and Bastardi the Three Stooges. Their gyrations are quite comical in a sad sort of way as they spread much misinformation and misperception to their eager followers who lap up every cherry-picked morsel. Thanks to you and so many others who contribute here, the average reader on this blog knows tens times more true science related to the Arctic and about the cryosphere in general than the Three Stooges combined.

Jim Williams, the SIA anomaly has not been back to normal in November since 2001, and with this years Arctic basin so far below normal and of course the rest of the Arctic virtually ice free, the likelihood of that happening this year is very remote. The strength of this winters recovery will be the subject of much interest. No better place to get an ongoing analysis than here.

Alan, I've certainly seen a lot of Atlantic heat being sucked up in a couple of storms and expect a good chunk of that to head north. They're likely to bring much of the Atlantic back to normal temps. Haven't been watching Europe. What's happening there?

I thought sea ice area would bottom out before extent, but while NSIDC looks like it might be turning a corner, Cryosphere Today Sea Ice Area, from day 226 to 249 sea ice area has gone down from 2.98632 mil. km^2 to 2.29821 mil. km^2, and the trend seems fairly constant over that period.

Jim, much of mainland Europe has had very high temperatures (record in Czech Republic) and drought, and is still warmer than normal, including Russia where the wind is now blowing towards the North. In the UK it has been very different, with a very dry start to the year which was cured by the introduction of a hose-pipe ban, when it immediately started to rain heavily until the Olympics!

IMS updated their chart for a new record as of Sept.11 of 3.573 million km square, to closely align with the rest of the extent trackers. With a little eyeballing this is well over 450K lower than their lowest recorded in Sep.2007, the no longer reference year. Adding this data, the cheat sheet on arctic sea ice records is now fairly complete.

In percentage decline, CT-SIA is well ahead of the rest of the pack at -23.1% and that's *just* from the previous record set on that metric in 2011.

Peter, MASIE 3 days trailing for the 11th is 3617000 were IMS has a published 3537000... oh dear, oh dear oh dear [from The New Statesman B'stard], El Toninô was holding on to the wrong straw at that, LoL. Anyway, just for completeness, since this is one of the dominoes declared.